Thinking about getting a new comp here is some few thougts of mine :P

Well as it is I am getting an uber bonus from my work in a couple of months, so thinking of replacing the good old system with a new one.

Here is my thoughts of a setup.

One of the newest Mobo's Asus got one that support pci express x16 on both GFX channels instead of dividing it 2 for then 8X on two cards.

Thought of going Dual Ati crossfire (saphire) For having combined 96 pipelines open and GDDR4 min 512mb editions

at least 4GB Ram, split with hmm Dual channel maybe?

here comes one of the sweet spots

Going to get 3 Hard drives build for performance

First one would be a 37-50GB WD Raptor
the two others would be 150GB WD Raptor

Plextor or whatever else DVD drive
Plextor Burner but thinking of waiting with this one maybe untill Blue ray gets more used around maybe for a lower price that is, in which would mean that the main DVD drive would be supporting Blue Ray as well dunno about the importance in that one really.

Chassis and PSU
Both Thermal Take, thinking of the special options that I can get with watercooling all over, but hmm how big should the PSU be? I was thinking somewhat in the 600Watt range?

CPU wise I am not completely sure either Should go for Dual core or Quad Core processor, does that mean with lets say Dual Core it would operate with '4 different CPU's' or in the manners of Quad Core it would be 8? with hyperthreading of course
It seems like the difference between intel and AMD seems to be like different use in power hence 115watt and below that for AMD!

Other points would be different sorts of other things, probably going with a new Soundcard as well since the one I use now is from 1999 or 2000 (sure an old bugga but it works haha)

I see no point in having a floppy drive!

I would probably add more cooling to the Harddrives, hence three all up close could become rather hot.. and be ending in burning off the drives longterm faster.

New O/S.. Thought of windows Vista since it seems to be the next step but not sure there either, in the ways of how would it operate and since it is new it is probably full of bugs, but for longterm use and patching it could become interesting, as well as stepping up into the 64bit range instead of 32bit.

All this would run up into alot of credits, that I know... but I am also in the thoughts better upgrade it all in one instead of be replacing GFX all the time because it cannot follow up with the standards and gets old to fast sorta, hence trying to be on a good step instead of having to replace new GFX all the time because of 'poor' performance.

any thoughts?

You're spending too much and you are putting to much in there. When in doubt, keep it simple. The geforce 8800 has the 96 pipes but you only need the one card. That will allow you to get an intel chipset on that asus board, always better. The raptor is nice, but don't run them in raids. Lose one drive and you are dead. Just doubling your chances of going down. Get the 150 for your main drive then the cheaper WD 160 or 320 for extra storage. They are actually nice drives. Don't run too many drives, just uses up extra heat and power when you mostly won't be using them.

Not too many programs use two processors, so you have a spare to run team speak. If you go quad, expect those extra processes to do nothing but create heat in your system and run up the electric bill without any real benefit.

You don't need water cooling, if you are going to spend this much, get a chip with the higher quality silicon. The intel stock fan on the core dous are good enough, especially if you don't need to overclock.

Motherboard sound is just as good as any sound card. You aren't building a home theater system here. If you are, well...

Stay away from vista until you absolutely need to get it.

well only got one thing to say with ya wise words Arch.. and that is screw you.. JUST kidding

About the water cooling system then I am probably going to run that one into live, got my eyes on a special chassis that has it built in from thermal take =) so well as it is now.. then going to live it through on the watercooling front, it is a trend with me to buy a new chassis with every new system I get, so that one I am gonna keep though it is rather heavy in weight vs normal chassis.

Been adviced to from other side with waiting with wndows vista, but not sure really, I mean why not just live it through?

I mean sooner or less I am going to upgrade anyway and there is nothing that I hate more than installing a new O/S with the following up penalties as formatting the drive.. the shit with doing drivers again, installing some programs again.

Which GFX manufacturer has the best performance and quality as it is now, ATI or NVIDIA?
In Ati I am going to stick what saphire put out, but what about NVIDIA, would ASUS be a good bet or whoever else, I know that some brands does not live up to quality performance according to what the card should be able to handle and the quality of the product itself, I rather want to spend 50 bucks more to then be sure of if it is superb quality as well as low failure rate.

About the harddrives, well hmm prolly gonna go with a Raptor 150 for mainsystems and such and then probably a couple of discs at 250GB each and be having one of them split into two, for a full backup or point of origin to play around with if I end up with a blasted system at some point for then just adding the backup of my complete system into the maindisc system disc, saving me for alot of trouble only leaving me with a couple driver upgrades and posible patches etc.

One final note and that is about the GFX cards, would I get better performance out of two or is one good enough really, well of course it would be best with the most raw power and would be making the system to hold longer without having to upgrade all the time, so my question there is would two cards linked save me for another upgrade at a later point for then saving me unplugging one card and buy another one?

If I was going to buy a DX10 card in the near future, I'd only buy one. 2nd and 3rd gen DX10 cards are just going to kick its ass when they do come out.

As far as ATI versus NVIDIA, ATI allows AA to be run with some other options on that NVIDIA won't. On the other hand, NVIDIA drivers generally are a lot better then the ATI ones. And when and if you decide to use two cards SLI is better then Crossfire easily at the moment.

If you're set on getting a DX10 card, then I'd go ahead and get Vista. You're going to have compatibility issues at first for some stuff, but it will get better and better. Security isn't a huge biggie because a lot of people are holding out for things to become more stable and therefore you won't see so many people writing exploits geared towards it. As it gets stabler and bugs worked out, expect more exploits and make sure you stay up to date as far as Windows Updates go. Anyways, they already released a security patch that fixed a lot of stuff when it was still in beta.

As far as manufacturer goes, I've had no complaints about my eVGA cards. They have good warranties, including lifetime ones for some of their newer cards. They come pre-overclocked, and even if you overclock them more past what you get them as, the warranty still applies.

And as far as 2 cards go, one is going to be quite enough if you get a beast like the 8800. Even with 2nd and 3rd gen cards probably offering 30%+ improvement, you still probably aren't going to have any problems for awhile with just one. Plus when the 2nd the 3rd gen cards DO come out, you havn't spent a whole lot of money and can either upgrade to one of them, or you can just buy another of the same model you have no, for a hell of a lot cheaper.

As with what Mep said, quadcore is blowing your money down the drain, unless you want a space heater. And Intel > AMD by a miles upon miles right now. The cheapest core 2 duo, can be very slightly overclocked to beat the best AMD has to offer at the moment, and the AMD costs almost twice as much. I bought an E6700 for my new computer, and even with two 7950GTs I never bottleneck them as far as I can tell.

RAID isn't worth it, like Mep said. Its something like a 5% improvement in load time, when all is said and done. RAM helps a lot more.

$15 will buy you a tube of Artic Silver, which is worth it buy the way.

Speaking of RAM, if you do go in excess of 3 gig, definitely go with Vista, so that you can put it to good use.

PSU wise, I think 550 is the absolute minimum for a dual card rig. 600 would be good and probably be fine, if you can get a good cheap 650w that would be better. With the number of drives you're talking about, the more power the better honestly.

Mobo wise, there are some nice ones out there, I have an ASUS nForce one, that comes with surround sound, so I didn't have to buy a sound card.

/end-my-2-cents

Make it simple. Buy a Compaq.

:doc:

Originally posted by Jayce
Make it simple. Buy a Compaq.

:doc:

I never would do that haha...

And thanks Nis =) alot of interesting ways looking at it as well.

well it is planned that I will go for at least 4GB in my system, so giving vista a shot.

Ya may be right about only buying one card in the beginning, but well would it allow me to run any game in at least 1600x1200 with every little fucken detail on eh?

Thinking of stuff such as shadow rendering/projecting is the killer for most systems

For soundcard.. I hate onboard shit really... rather want something I can actually play around with as well

SO a quick summary:

Got the CPU set (going intel Duo Core)
Got the ram issue set (4GB minimum)
Got the hd issue set (1 hardcore for systems + 1 forstorage)
Got sound set (Prolly going for the best Creative got in stock)
Got chassis set (ThermalTake chassis + ThermalTake PSU min 600W)
Got different drives set (DVD, CD... etc.)
Got Mobo set (Going with Asus =))

Almost got the VGA card set I am not sure IN WHICH BRAND I should chose... screw the model, but would it BE Asus or MSI or whatever else that really runs the pot now?

Well if you are going with water cooling, do so because you like to tinker and want to try it out. Once you get over it, throw it out and get an air cooled one. The pumps on them don't last much more than a year, even the thermatake one. If the pump doesn't die, the washers or the tubing will. Having water all over an expensive comp isn't worth it, especially since the the air cool jobs are almost if not just as good.

Get the eVGA geforce 8800 and an ASUS mb with a intel chipset. I believe it is the 965 chipset that is the current flavor of the month. If you hook up two video cards you'll need a mb with a chipset made by ati or nvida. Neither are at the quality level of the intel chipset. After that pick up a nice core2 duo, you don't need the extreme edition, you'll just be throwing money way. The performance gain for the price just isn't there.

Your HD options sounds fine, but look at the WD 160 platers. Those are nice. You get one or two, so 160 or 360gigs. If you get two 160s, you can use one to back up the 150 raptor then the other to store files. That is a good set up.

I know doing vista now will be easiest to do. Nivida doesn't have good vista drivers yet. On top of that the DRM crap on vista is evil. Any video or audio file you own that doesn't have proper DRM according to mircosoft will sound or look like crap. Vista was not written with the end customer in mind, but the cooperate customers that paid to have the evil copy protection in place. I will go as many years as I can without vista until I have no choice.

A ~2.8ghz core2duo, 8800, 4gig ram, and 150gig raptor would be a very nice system right now. It will last you a good 4 years at least, especially if you don't do anything silly, like have a bunch of water spill all over it. :mep:

prolly going to look over water cooling again haha .

But it annoys me when the heat go up around 35-45 degrees celcius when I really would like to tip max at 35 and down to the 20 range in celcius.

Guess Vaapochill chassis could be a last resort for such... friggen system can freeze the processor down to minus 19 degrees celcius.

Only problem with a cooled down system is the posible problem with moisture condensing in the system way to much, would probably say if you can get the system down to 25 celcius it would be more than awesome, but it would need let me see a silver cooling sink to be able to lead as much heat off as posible and a tremendous flow of air as well.

not sure if one can get oil cooled systems yet, but fluid cools better than air and we all know that.

The core2duos are design to run about 50C. Less is always better, but I wouldn't get too obsessive about it.

Water is a good heat sink, but in the end all it does is transfer the heat. Eventually air has to cool down the water. In that regard metal is a better transferrer of heat. Those extreme cooling conditions are only useful if you are going to over clock your processor, and some of those solutions cost more than just getting a better chip. They really are just a gimmick.

so to me more precise you suggest a closed circuit in which I dont want to pay for hehe, will? take it easy on the water cooling front then

Will it is your money and you can do with it as you wish. I just hate to see you spend too much for something you don't need only to have it turn around and bit you in the ass.